#ahistorical

[black-is-beautiful18]

Y’all are so stupid and antiblack. Sure we’re talking about a fictional franchise called Pirates of the CARIBBEAN but somehow people think there were no Black pirates. Never mind that Black Caesar, an actual Black man, served under Blackbeard of all people. Never mind that Queen Nanny of the Maroons was going around being a pirate and freeing slaves. Never mind the legend of Jacquotte Delahaye, who even though it is fiction has a literal book coming out about her, exists. Never mind the stories of Black pirates from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean existing. But sure. Let’s get mad at the potential fact that Ayo Edebiri might be leading the new start up of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Cuz Black pirates didn’t exist 🙄.

[khaire-traveler]

Opinion time with Kas:

I absolutely hate those conspiracy theories that are like, "This human wonder was made by aliens!" This is ahistorical at best, and extremely racist at worst. See, when these people make such claims, they're usually referring to non-white human wonders, such as African tribes having knowledge of math and certain star systems or the Nazca Lines in Peru. So these people think non-white ancient civilizations weren't capable of discovering this knowledge themselves or??? But obviously, it makes perfect sense if white people make these discoveries without "alien aid".

This belief system is just so frustrating to me. As a white person, I cannot speak on the experiences of minorities directly, but honestly, these types of conspiracy theories seem incredibly racist to me. I cannot imagine how extremely aggravating it must be for minorities who stem from these ancient civilizations to have their cultural backgrounds and ancient histories reduced to "oh, little green men created all of these world wonders, obviously!" I think it's really important to speak out about and address this issue because of how insanely offensive it can be.

These types of conspiracies are extremely harmful, for a variety of reasons. Please be careful when interacting with them. Keep yourself historically educated, and remember the harm theories like these cause.

-

If any minorities would like to speak on this issue and reblog with additions, I encourage you to do so! I would really love to hear from those directly impacted by these ludicrous claims. Much love to you. 🫂

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 6, 2022

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.

Each of these themes merits more discussion. The first is the simplest to lay out: Bluntly, while often treated as some kind of unique American foundational curse, chattel slavery — and such similar abuses as the brutal mistreatment of battle captives — was almost universal on earth until the past few centuries, as Dan McLaughlin explains in detail elsewhere in this issue. The practice was commonplace across ancient societies, including Greece and Rome, with Aristotle defending “natural slavery,” and social scientists describing it as the step of human development after people had stopped simply killing and eating their defeated foes.

Slavery was also well known in the allegedly Edenic New World. The anthropologist Marvin Harris has argued that the Aztecs waged war to acquire captives not merely as laborers or sacrifice victims but as food, since their diet lacked protein otherwise: Aztec slaves were seen as “marching meat.” Even nations that did not officially have slaves, such as Russia and some other Orthodox Christian states, often squeaked around the designation by calling oppressed peons who could not freely leave their land something less harsh, such as “chattel serfs.” In Russia’s case, they were not freed until 1861.

The global slave trade was in large part ended by the modern West. The United States banned any importation of slaves in 1808, and the British Empire passed laws restricting the Arab slave trade that same year. It is no exaggeration to say that, from that date forward, the navies of the United Kingdom and America were the primary force on earth working to check the slave trade. In this, they were largely successful — meaning that the unique contribution of English-speaking Westerners to the worldwide slave economy was the near elimination of the trade.

It is also simply not true that slavery made the United States rich. Slavery made many slave masters rich indeed, and some of them invested their brutally gotten gains in American business and industry. One such profiteer, quite arguably, funded Yale University. But the real question for any quantitative social scientist must be: Did slavery — feudal peon agriculture centered on brutalized captive workers — generate more capital than any alternative use of the same area of land and the same number of workers? Here, the answer (again) is a clear-cut no.

The slaveholding South was, frankly, a backwater. As I noted in my Quillette article “Sorry, New York Times, but America Began in 1776,” the region contained more than 25 percent of America’s free population but only about 10 percent of the nation’s capital. Versus the South, the North had ten times as many trained factory workers and five times as many factories. Writers such as the historian Marc Schulman have pointed out that something like 90 percent of the skilled tradesmen in the U.S. were based in the North prior to 1861. And even analyses like these tend to ignore the horrific costs to the United States of the Civil War — which killed 360,000 Union boys in blue (one for every ten slaves freed) and 258,000 Confederates, as well as putting the country billions of dollars into debt for the first time.

Perhaps the negative reality of what slavery actually was explains why so many Americans fought so damned hard to end it. Another point often minimized by “woke,” “critical” narratives of American history and race relations is that an integrated movement opposed to racism has existed in the United States almost since the Founding. And this movement has generally won our major battles against bigotry — in 1865, in 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), in 1964 (the Civil Rights Act), and, for good or ill, in 1967 (affirmative action).

As early as the 1790s, following a letter- and petition-writing campaign by black New England veterans of the Revolutionary War, ten states and territories that already contained well over half the population of the new nation — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana (territory), and the Northwest Territory — had banned slavery and were free land. As noted above, any importation of slaves into any of the U.S. states was banned by law in 1808. And, although viciously opposed, the abolitionist movement continued until the Civil War, which the good guys won. When Union soldiers marched south to free their countrymen, they did so, no matter how complex the motivations of some of them, singing the famous words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”

Many early leaders of the American abolitionist and anti-racist movement were black men and women, and they did not hate the country. Frederick Douglass, of course, once famously asked, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” But in the same speech, the great man referred to the core ideas of the Declaration of Independence as “saving principles,” called the Founding Fathers “brave men,” and contrasted their “solid manhood” with what he saw as his own more decadent era.

While noting that “the point from which I am compelled to view” the fathers of the republic “is not, certainly, the most favorable,” Douglass also said, “It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men.” Such quotations abound, and it is always refreshing to contrast the nuanced but real patriotism of such black leaders as Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr. — or Robert Woodson and Thomas Sowell today — with the trendy pablum spewed out by the current academic Marxists. The New York Times’ first draft of the 1619 Project, notably, apparently did not mention Douglass at all.

The project’s rhetoric also lacks the veracity of Douglass’s. Objectively speaking, the most bizarre and nonempirical of the four “context needed” problems I identified with the 1619 Project is the argument that everything “exceptional” — unique and positive — about the United States emerged out of pre-1865 slavery. While writing this piece, I repeated that claim in passing to a scholarly friend of mine, and she said, “Like . . . modern East Asian immigration? I mean, that’s totally nuts.”

She’s right. Black folks contributed massively to the United States, but many of the great triumphs of American history — the full sweep of the NASA missions, the development of the post–World War II California economy, Chinese and Irish migration, the mass production of automobiles — had very little to do with historical black slavery. Bluntly stated, this fact illustrates an important point: In recent years, the focus of discourse on the race and gender obsessions of the academic Left has threatened to overshadow the rest of American history. Almost certainly, far more high-school students could identify Malcolm X than Martin Van Buren or the Wright Brothers.

That’s bad. It is doubtful that an eyes-open minority immigrant to the United States of 2021 would see contemporary, or even historical, racial conflict as one of the five or ten most notable things about the country — compared with democracy, or hyper-robust capitalism, or diversity itself, or the constant flickering of cellphone cameras and social-media posts, or, for that matter, the weather — unless he had been very specifically taught to do so. And we who already live here would be foolish to see racial conflict as the defining characteristic of our country, although a surprising and increasing number of Amer­icans seem obsessively interested in seeing exactly that.

Let’s see something else: the truth. The 1619 Project makes claims about slavery that are sweeping, interesting, and sometimes accurate. But in taking the singular focus that it does, the project minimizes the global universality of slavery, its negative economic impact, the reaction of contemporaneous black leaders to it and to the country overall, and the far larger sweep of all the rest of American history. Parents and others opposed to 1619 aren’t “scared” and don’t want a warts-free telling of American history. But they don’t want an ideologically driven, all-warts narrative either. They want honest history, warts and all, and we should accommodate them.

[ Via: https://archive.today/PCRfV ]

[geopolicraticus]

An Ahistorical Conception of History

Non-Naturalistic Categoricity.—Schopenhauer gives us an essentially naturalistic form of historical categoricity, but the idea of a non-naturalistic historical categoricity could be said to characterize most history prior to the modern era, when every mundane detail was a symbol for a higher truth. The thirteenth century French work, Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, embodies an ahistorical conception of history in which nothing essential changes, in which the world has always been what it is, and will always be as it is. The Faits des Romains continues this tradition, further elaborating the ahistorical conception of history and institutionalizing what Huizinga would call historical ideals of life, doing so in the form of the life of Julius Caesar. Only, the relationship between past and present was not exclusively the emulation of past ideals, but also the transformation of the past into recognizably present forms, so that the past is no longer past, but is the embodiment of the present in an altered form. The non-naturalistic context of this conception yields, not surprisingly, an ahistorical conception of history. But, in its ahistorical historical consciousness, the Middle Ages was not without historical consciousness, but rather possessed an historical consciousness that did not know itself to be such. This is a paradoxical historical consciousness, to be sure, but no more paradoxical than the modern historical consciousness that sees nothing but progress while committing atrocities on an scale previously unknown in history. It may be that all forms of historical consciousness are paradoxical.

[hadesoftheladies]

tell me you got your “education” on history from redtube without telling me

i think men shutting tf up would solve a lot of problems

[hyenaswine]

actually tumblr it's called a jock sock 🙄

[aislop]

Listen—barring for all the usual hallmarks of a shit-quality generative-AI image (including the fact that this alleged photo trying to look as if it's from the early-to-mid-20th century sepia/black-and-white, but for some reason has color on the eyes), what even is the anatomical build of these people?

If the middle person is used as basis for average height, what in the gangly fuck is happening to those on either side of him? Especially on the left side of the photo.

Petr Válek / the.vape.noise

[kazz-brekker]

legit kind of sad about the my lady jane cancellation. it just really sucks to be living in an era of television where it feels like you can't get invested in anything new and interesting without constantly fearing that it's going to get yanked away from you and unceremoniously cancelled

[walkman-cat]

felt like designing her some ensembles :D !!

[salvadorbonaparte]

Myths, nation- and identity building are really fascinating because one thing I noticed in Europe is that no matter what kind you contact you had with the Roman Empire people are using it to build identity. "The Romans came here and here are some Roman buildings and roads and the name of this place is Latin in origin :D" vs "The Romans never conquered us in fact we absolutely beat the shit out of them :D"

[danoshanter]

This is such a dangerous lie. It is why most Americans are so easily manipulated that we almost had a violent overthrow of the country.

THOSE WHO ARE IGNORANT OF HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT, YOU DAMN FOOLS. IT'S EVEN A EFFING PROVERB, that's how basic it is.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and an alarming number of the citizens of my own country are just about the most ahistorical head-in-the-sand idiots I can possibly name.

It works on the personal level too. Either you learn from your past mistakes AND successes -- rather than burying them under some kind of cotton-candy lala positive thinking pablum that won't even let you admit that the past EXISTS -- or you'll be easy prey to the next mistake that does come along BECAUSE YOU WON'T HAVE ANY MORE SKILLS TO AVOID IT THAN YOU DID WHEN YOU MADE THE FIRST MISTAKE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

“Never carry things on from the past. The past is gone. Every moment - be rid of it, solved or unsolved. Drop it, and don’t carry parts - because those parts won’t allow you to solve new problems that live in this moment.”

— Osho

[a-very-tired-jew]

Once in a while a blog I blocked a some time ago slips through due to another reblogging them. It gives me a glimpse into what has been going on since, and usually it’s just as bad or worse as what caused me to block them in the first place.

In this case it’s our old friend Tikkunolamresistance, and let me tell you shalomies… it’s unhinged

Now, we know they're a tankie at minimum, and some will say they're a Russian bot. Regardless, they can try and turn this around all they want by decrying other Jews saying they're not Jewish or what not. But they're just reiterating Protocols level antisemitic conspiracies with a new coat of paint. That's why so many of us side eye them and others who endorse this type of rhetoric. Just because it's "in vogue" to repurpose antisemitic conspiracies as "anti-Zionist" does not mean you get a free pass as a Jew. You are actively supporting, endorsing, and engaging with rhetoric that harms us and you, and it's very alarming. But this is best summed up with the following meme that I immediately made upon seeing this post.

[weaverofink]

imagine if claire actually had a good outfit during wizards

[deanmarywinchester]

really really enjoy how The Bright Sword depicts post-Arthurian britain as this once colonized, twice abandoned place. like it was conquered and then abandoned by the romans, who remade the aristocracy and language in their image and christianized the country and left behind works of engineering that would not be replicated for a thousand-plus years. then it was this land of christian miracles held together by Arthur and God, and then God abandoned the country and those kinds of miracles were never seen again

and the book explicitly plays with the connections between the Roman Empire and Christian/monarchist power, mentioning that some crackpots believe in the eventual return of the Roman Empire the way that people believe Arthur will return some day, and having the protagonist marvel at roman mining machinery that seems impossible to believe could have ever worked the way he marvels at stories of the Quest for the Grail

not 100% sure where this is going but it’s very effective for being a story about how the age of heroes is dead, because the age of wonders and power is sort of twice dead.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

The lying continues from the pro-Palestinian camp. 

If they had the same claim to the land as they say they do, they would know of multiple witness statements describing parts of historic Palestine as being barren. (We don’t claim it was *all* barren.) 

One of those witness statements came from none other than Mark Twain. Multiple pictures can attest to this barrenness as well. Just take a look at what is now Tel Aviv at the turn of the last century. And of course, some early Arab nationalists noted that an influx of Jewish immigrants with western farming technology would help revive the land.

Even today, much of Area C of the West Bank is devoid of inhabitants. 

But let’s not let facts-- or even correct geography!-- get in the way of lying about Israel and Zionism! 

Image Link

[cannabiscomrade]

we cannot begin to act like intersex transphobes and transmisogynists don't exist, and it is actively dangerous to perpetuate that these demographics don't exist. There are absolutely intersex circles that frame their ideology around the "disordered male/female" idea.

Intersex and trans solidarity is key to keeping both of our communities alive- but intersex TERFs are a thing. Intersex transphobes who align themselves under the DSD label are very real and just like transmasc TERFs will use their marginalized status as a weapon against others and a justification of their exterminatory behavior.

Intersexism is a core culture issue of TERF and other transphobe rhetoric, they often operate under and agree with the medicalization of intersex bodies or the "disorders of sexual development" label. TERFs believing that their own intersex female body is just disordered further justifies their idea that there is an ideal framework surrounding the idea of being "female", and inherently means it's something trans women cannot obtain- regardless of intersex status. It is still rooted in transmisogyny.